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As if print media wasn’t already doomed (what with that thing called the internet having nearly obliterated its business model), a censorious activist organization has swooped in to finish it off and pick at its carcass.

I’m referring to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an American anti-pornography non-profit with religious roots that appears to have successfully pressured Walmart to remove a major magazine from its checkout counter newsstands. That magazine is Cosmopolitan, a publication you might associate with impractical sex tips (from 2010: “apply a little tomato sauce to your nipple …”), but that probably doesn’t spring to mind when you think about sexual exploitation and violence. That is unless you’re a member of the NCOSE. According to the organization’s website, Cosmo “is a visually hypersexualized and verbally pornographic magazine. It relentlessly glamorizes things like public, anal, group, and violent sex to its young female readership.”

It’s unfortunate that Walmart, perhaps in a lame attempt to appear “woke”— a.k.a. with it — has caved to pressure from an organization that believes bikini shots of famous actresses are a leading influence in the violent, exploitation of women, writes Emma Teitel. (ZVI LOWENTHAL / New York Times file photo)

This description certainly doesn’t fit any Cosmo I’ve ever read. Granted, a “Lose-Ten-Pounds-In-Ten-Days” regimen included in the magazine’s November 1976 issue, suggests a lunch of “broiled hamburger” and “black coffee.” In other words, the magazine may at one time have promoted violent diarrhea. But violent sex? Have any of these prudes flipped through a Cosmo lately? If they did, they’d know that like a lot of traditionally vapid women’s glossies (Teen Vogue, for example) Cosmo has taken a sharp feminist turn these last few years.

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Some of the magazine’s recent titles include “7 Sex Positions Pretty Much Guaranteed to Help You Orgasm,” “5 Mutual Masturbation Sex Positions That Will Get You Both There STAT,” “Hating Twitter Feminism means Excluding Young Women from the Me Too Conversation,” “17 Reasons Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Goals AF,” “It’s Time to Talk About the Deadly Stigma Against Fat Bodies,” and “31 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions.” (Although I’m really curious to know what kind of lesbian takes sex tips from Cosmo. That’s like ordering a salad at McDonalds. It’s just not their forte.)

Prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Cosmopolitan grilled Ivanka Trump about her father’s child care and maternity leave plan, backing the future first daughter into a corner. “So I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions,” she said in response to a critical question about her dad’s controversial comments about pregnant women in the workplace.

The point is Cosmo isn’t by any means an enemy of female empowerment but a populist engine for it. And yet, maybe that’s the problem. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is arguably a conservative organization. Sure it’s tooting the Me Too horn. “In the Me Too era Walmart has taken a stand against treating women as sex objects,” the group tweeted this week. “Finally, one less objectifying magazine we are forced to walk by!” But the NCOSE doesn’t appear to perceive women as individuals with sexual liberty. If it did, it wouldn’t list the following as “significant achievements” on its website: “Stopping mainstream hotels from hosting sex industry expos” and “The hotel industry’s removal of on-demand pornography from the television offerings in guest rooms.”

The group has a noble goal of curbing violence against women but its mission appears to involve curbing a lot of other normal, healthy sexual behaviour, too, not to mention nosing in other people’s business when they aren’t hurting themselves or anybody else.

It appears that Me Too and its objective of eroding sexual assault and harassment provides a convenient cover for prudish illiberal groups to push prudish illiberal agendas in the name of women’s rights, agendas that most modern day feminists would not condone.

It’s unfortunate that Walmart, perhaps in a lame attempt to appear “woke”— a.k.a. with it — has caved to pressure from an organization that believes bikini shots of famous actresses are a leading influence in the violent, exploitation of women. (As opposed to say, an alleged sexual predator in the White House.) The NCOSE, meanwhile, is elated with the retailer’s decision. On Tuesday it tweeted the following: “EXCITING Victory! Kids will no longer be automatically exposed to this magazine filled with explicit descriptions of sexting, porn, group sex, and more.”

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